Lefschetz fibrations and the Hodge bundle

Abstract

Integral symplectic 4–manifolds may be described in terms of Lefschetz fibrations. In this note we give a formula for the signature of any Lefschetz fibration in terms of the second cohomology of the moduli space of stable curves. As a consequence we see that the sphere in moduli space defined by any (not necessarily holomorphic) Lefschetz fibration has positive “symplectic volume”; it evaluates positively with the Kähler class. Some other applications of the signature formula and some more general results for genus two fibrations are discussed.